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FedKad
Asked: 2019-10-10 08:26:11 +0800 CST

tracker service running every minute

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I have the following lines repeating every minute in my /var/log/syslog file.

Oct  9 19:19:42 my_machine dbus-daemon[2138]: [session uid=1000 pid=2138] Activating via systemd: service name='org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.Extract' unit='tracker-extract.service' requested by ':1.66' (uid=1000 pid=2555 comm="/usr/lib/tracker/tracker-miner-fs " label="unconfined")
Oct  9 19:19:42 my_machine systemd[2118]: Starting Tracker metadata extractor...
Oct  9 19:19:42 my_machine dbus-daemon[2138]: [session uid=1000 pid=2138] Successfully activated service 'org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Miner.Extract'
Oct  9 19:19:42 my_machine systemd[2118]: Started Tracker metadata extractor.
Oct  9 19:19:53 my_machine systemd[2118]: tracker-extract.service: Succeeded.

Can somebody explain what is going on.

My system is Ubuntu 19.04 with latest updates. This problem seems to have started around April 21st. Probably after upgrading 18.10 to 19.04.

How can I change the period from 1 minute to (say) 1 hour?

systemd tracker

3 Answers

  1. The modern way to disable Tracker is found here:

    Run the following command to disable tracker for the current user:

    systemctl --user mask tracker-store.service tracker-miner-fs.service tracker-miner-rss.service tracker-extract.service tracker-miner-apps.service tracker-writeback.service
tracker reset --hard
sudo reboot

    Interestingly the question was quite popular in 2013:

    The solution to disable it here is now outdated. Just pointing out the more things change the more they stay the same...

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  2. I detected the same thing on my system, too (based upon 20.04 LTS) but I am not too worried, but you should be if you see a performance degradation. This text indexing is meant to facilitate quick searches especially in these well-known areas:

        DOCUMENTS
    MUSIC
    PICTURES
    VIDEOS
    DOWNLOAD

    You can get an idea of how much of your content is actively indexed. Here's mine.

        $ tracker status
    Currently indexed: 590 files, 37 folders
    Remaining space on database partition: 124.1 GB (49.63%)
    All data miners are idle, indexing complete

    Maybe you have a lot more files being tracked than I do, but notice how it reports that I have used 50% of the space on this drive, yet only 590 files are indexed? It's because I don't have much stored in those well-publicized directories.

    The thing is text indexes once created are really cheap and quick to maintain. They are actually a type of database with an inverted B-tree structure.

    Making a quick scan to see if any text needs updating is really fast, so I wouldn't be alarmed about the 1 minute frequency unless you are noticing a slowdown.

    If you're having a slowdown, or don't need all your MUSIC files scanned, try creating a directory maybe AUDIO and move the files there. The tracker should ease up and not keep so busy.

    Here's another source to look at if you think that a tracker reset is the thing for you.

    https://codeforlearning.com/understanding-about-tracker-miner-f-in-linux/

    Good luck, mondotofu

    • 1

  3. Type the following into your terminal.

    tracker daemon --list-common-statuses --watch

    Now open another terminal and touch hello and then nano into hello. Start typing in random data. save it and watch that daemon light up. Check out the links associated with the data.

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